Sell Smartly

Sales is no Sin!

Effective Sales (and Marketing) means your product meeting exactly the people who'd like to buy it! The terrible reputation of Sales (and Marketing), as a place inhabited by pushy, manipulative, passive-aggressive Trolls is undeserved.

Consumerism

If your product or service matches a genuine need, a genuine desire, then you only need to understand and match that desire, to reach those people. People are used to consumerism, to getting what they want, for the product to magically appear at the exact time and space where they want it. If you are trying to convert people, to convince them, to force them, then it's a lost cause.

Selling is only part of the process

As an entrepreneur it's very difficult to sell the right product in the right place, and at the right time in history. Sell it where nobody is looking, too soon such that too few understand it, or too late such that nobody is interested anymore, and you will fail!

There are very very few people who can pull it off. Mostly it just works in the classic evolutionary fashion... Thousands of idealists launching their seeds and just hoping they get carried by chance to a sunny glade with good profitable soils. Generally, however, almost all those seeds rot where they land. Welcome to starting up!!!

Making Sales

Lets assume you have the right idea, people need it, and you're selling it at the right time in history. What's the first thing to consider? Well, what is it about the product you're selling that really fits with what your customers are looking for? This question is the first step to a deeper understanding. It implies understanding who your customers are, where they are, how they think, how they feel. It means meeting with a representative sample of your customers and talking to them, testing what they respond to, and what they don't respond to. This doesn't imply being a pushy sociopath - it means compassion. This is at the heart of marketing .

Barriers - Well, I've found the right people, but they still aren't buying?

It's been said many times and it is still true "The currency of the Web is Trust". Potential customers don't know you from Adam. They have little time, and little trust. It takes up to six interactions before a customer will generally even *think* about making a purchase (one reason why often used platforms such as Amazon have a huge trust advantage). You need to be establishing trust, and establishing interactions, immediately. Yes, this involves some cunning, and some psychology, but if you're not selling something immoral, neither is this.

Breaking it down - Find the customers so they can find you

Where are your customers? Where can you find your people and what options do you have : Quite frankly, there are too many to list here, so think about it! Are they already in groups (Fb, LinkedIn, Xing, SnapChat etc.), on given sites, following certain interests? Do you already know them, or have their email addresses? Can you reach them with advertising? Quick tip: Facebook Ads are now beating Google Ads in the U.S. - not only are they more configurable, they're also about 20% of the price! Would a service like Outbrain help catch their attention? Bring them to your site.

This is called driving traffic to your site, in the form of leads (*potential contacts*).

Breaking it down - Build trust and sell

The age old way to build trust is to offer your visitor a gift, and to spend some time with them. It can be abused, but you're not going to do that, right? What sort of home page is going to help you offer your visitor a gift, and establish an on-going two way communication? It turns out that it's probably not a homepage, but a landing page!

The best filter for finding people who might really be interested in what you offer, is what marketers call the "Lead Magnet". This is the free gift, in exchange for which your visitors open themselves up for future interactions with you - it's part of the age old exchange. Offering this free gift, in exchange for contact information, is the sole purpose of a landing page.

What's free?

Something worthless remains worthless, even if it is free. Make the effort to find something which you can afford to gift but into which you have invested some love and effort. This might be a digital product (e.g. a pdf download containing interesting information), connecting the lead to others of a similar persuasion (joining a group), a free consultation, or access to an event (e.g. a pre-recorded Webinar). The most valuable contact data you can get, remains an email address. Email not only remains the most effective channel for transforming leads into contacts, when combined with intelligent email automation, it is also the most affordable!

Of these free gifts, perhaps the most interesting is the pre-recorded Webinar. The lead must free up time to attend the Webinar which is only shown at a specific time and date, by invite. It is, in effect, a video - but with no rewind or pause. This means the viewer concentrates like crazy as there is no second chance (assuming you have made a good Webinar!). This is an incredibly valuable pitch platform - just don't waste it on the wrong people or implement it poorly! Your lead's time is like gold dust!

What's an automated email funnel?

Once you have an email address you have your best chance to establish sufficient interactions that trust is built, and a sale is possible. If you're interacting with a random person who isn't actually interested, you're just wasting their time and your resources, so again - focus. Repeated, automatically timed email follow ups, based on pre-prepared email templates, represent repeated prompts for interactions. They should contain valuable informational tid-bits as a form of micro-gift. Ideally follow Pimsleur curve spacings when it comes to timings - operating in line with the human mind's quirky preference for finding information overly significant just before it is going to be forgotton. There are other weaker mechanisms (such as Retargeting), but this is the gold standard.

Conversion.

What we've been talking about in marketing speak is that you want to convert appropriate leads into contacts (known people with whom you can repeatedly interact), who may in turn close deals with you (buy things). Converting from leads to contacts is, surprise, called the conversion process, and it's the heart of online sales .

Making it possible - that all sounds like a LOT of work

Make software your employees. It's possible for the smallest teams (or one-man-bands) to behave as if they are massive in the same way that factories churn out millions of products with relatively few staff - through automation. Interactions with people are just plain difficult, and if you're going to automate using dumb machines, you *really* need to think and understand what's going on so that your processes run "with the human touch". If you are struggling, we can help you here - from working out what your Lead Magnet should be, to automating your email processes.

It's not for everyone

Please be aware, these approaches work best for products under 1-2 thousand euros in value. The most appropriate strategies change as the value of the individual invest change in orders of magnitude (with respect to the income of the purchasing party).

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Contact

Want to work with us? Send me a mail : ben@sefol.com.

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